The Owl Forest Inn

cozy firelight, flickering shadows; dispatches from a word witch in the woods

[scriptingpoetizingproser-deacti]

My Writer Aesthetic

My style of writer academia:

Rainy days, natural sunlight, libraries, old books, cozy sweaters, antique desks covered in beautiful leather, inspirational quotes, dark chocolate mochas, and pretty notebooks.

[theowlforestinn]

Wild garlic, bones, and mushrooms in my wood.

Forest of Dean, England. March 2022

[buglegs00]

goblincore + dark academia

<3

[yellowpoet]

The best advice really is to just write. Write badly - purple prose, stilted conversations, rambling descriptions. Don’t delete it, pass go, take your $200, save all your garbage in a big folder. Look at how much you’ve made - it doesn’t matter if it isn’t perfect, isn’t polished, it was practice. Every time you write you learn a little more, and find another piece of your voice.

[possum-adjacent]

“If you’re only going to write when you’re inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you will never be a novelist — because you’re going to have to make your word count today, and those words aren’t going to wait for you, whether you’re inspired or not. So you have to write when you’re not “inspired.” … And the weird thing is that six months later, or a year later, you’re going to look back and you’re not going to remember which scenes you wrote when you were inspired and which scenes you wrote because they had to be written.”

- Neil Gaiman

this made me realize i was literally just using inspiration as an excuse to procrastinate

[some-stars]

me sitting here today thinking how much i don’t want to finish off the kidfic sequel bc wehhhhhhhh getting slapped in the face with this post

[jackironsides]

‘WRITE IT BADLY. Write it badly, write it badly, write it badly, write it badly. Stop what you’re doing, open a Word document, put a pencil on some paper, just get the idea out of your head. Let it be good later. Write it down now. Otherwise it will die in there.’

— Brandon Sanderson on overcoming writer’s block to create a first draft as a professional author (quoted in this tumblr post here)

‘Writing tip of the day: it is perfectly acceptable, when working on a scene that vexes you, to write “DUMBEST VERSION” along the top of the page and start from there.   As I, a human who has been writing professionally for 25 years, just did. Give yourself permission to suck.‘

— John Rogers (on his twitter here)

[theowlforestinn]

The problem with reading a good book is then I want to write one.

[thoughtkick]

“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”

— Carl Gustav Jung

[theowlforestinn]

I read a productivity blog a years ago that effectively said “find a system, use it for life.” I’ve never found a one size fits all productivity system to begin with, and my life has changed on so many levels since then anyway. Even just in the last 6 years I’ve moved abroad, had a child, changed industries, went from freelancer to FT employee. And even within the FT role, the responsibilities have changed over time, too.

But I do like Cal Newport’s Deep Work, and recently I started doing the focus “scorecard” again. When I started this card, got a sticker for each hour of “deep work” done. But I found that getting a full hour was proving difficult around the meetings and other distractions of my role and then I felt unproductive. So I decided that now I get a sticker for each half an hour. If I get so fractured that focus for 5 minutes in an achievement? I’ll change it again.

I think it’s good to have a system. I also think it’s good to be able to adapt it, because for most of us, things change. So this is a reminder for me: it’s okay to change the system.

(If you’re squinting at the header, it’s because I write in a funny shorthand when it’s just for me.)

[theowlforestinn]

So I guess my aesthetic is wandering around the house with a pile of notebooks, devices, a pencil bag, and tea.